Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

The holidays are over, and the news just keeps coming and coming…

(1) A mother’s story of how she was brainwashed into thinking she should raise her child without any messages whatsoever about belonging to one sex or another, and how the consequences of that decision finally were brought home to her and she changed her approach. It took a fairly dramatic situation to do it, too.

(2) A sizable majority – 63% of likely voters – wants the FBI’s involvement in social media censorship investigated. That’s impressive, considering how the MSM has sat on the story.

(3) Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker keeps running into snags. The narrow House majority for the GOP means he can’t afford to lose many votes. The conservative holdouts have been pressing him for concessions, and he’s granted some:

McCarthy’s central concession is allowing for any five Republican representatives to force of vote of no confidence in the speaker. He also vowed to end the practice of proxy voting and virtual participation in hearings, requiring lawmakers to be in Washington to participate in hearings and votes.

My problem with all of this is simple. I have no great love for McCarthy, but I’d like to know what challenger in the GOP can get the support to win the job. I don’t think supposed contender Andy Biggs has a chance of amassing the requisite number of votes, but who knows? Without a viable alternative to McCarthy, this doesn’t help the right – unless in the end they are doing this to get concessions from McCarthy in order to force him to the right and then will join the vote to elect him Speaker.

(4) It’s come out that Ray Epps wrote a text to his family on January 6th claiming that he “orchestrated it.” Andrea Widburg sums the situation up this way:

The videos of Ray Epps, a tall, gray-haired man urging people to the Capitol, that are posted at The Revolver will suffice to show that Epp’s behavior was open and perfectly met the Democrats’ own description of what constitutes an “insurrection.” (I’m not agreeing with their definition, I’m just saying that Epps meets it.)

What’s truly bizarre is affirmative disinterest that the Democrats and the FBI (but I repeat myself) are showing in Epps. And by “affirmative,” I meant that, despite the FBI having him on its radar, it erased him entirely from consideration, while the January 6 Committee called him a good guy.

(5) Blogger Gerard Vanderleun of American Digest, who’s also a sometime commenter here, is having various health problems. Good wishes and prayers are welcome.

The Democrats reveal the contents of Al Capone’s vaults Trump’s tax returns….

The New Neo Posted on by

…and find nothing. They even have trouble pretending to find something.

What was wrong with the House Ways and Means Committee requesting Trump’s tax returns, and SCOTUS granting their release? Just about everything. Here’s the statement on it from the Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee:

…[T]he Committee Majority’s action set a dangerous new precedent. It is apparent from the proceedings that the Committee Majority set out with the goal of obtaining and publishing the former President’s full tax returns. Everything since then has been a search for a rationale or justification that would be acceptable to the courts. Committee Republicans are not focused on whether the former President should have made his tax returns public, which has been tradition. Nor are Committee Republicans focused on the accuracy of those tax returns – that is for the IRS to determine in the ongoing audits of the former President.

Committee Republicans are concerned that this politically motivated action unleashes a dangerous new political weapon reaching far beyond the former President and overturns decades of privacy protections for average Americans.

Going forward, the new precedent is that the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee have nearly unlimited power to target and make public the tax returns of private citizens, political enemies, business or labor leaders, or even Supreme Court justices.

And it was all for nothing. Trump always knew it. I strongly believe that the Democrats knew it, too, but thought they could spin it into something nefarious anyway. They certainly have been trying, but I think it’s one of those things that will be forgotten very soon, if it hasn’t been already. But the terrible precedent has been set.

I also blame SCOTUS for allowing it. Did they really buy the argument from the Democrats on the committee that it was just for a legislative purpose?

What are you doing New Year’s Eve?

The New Neo Posted on by

And me? Glad you asked.

Nada, zip, zilch.

Oh, I might visit a nearby friend for a short while and have a sip of champagne, a tiny toast to the end of 2021, a year I’m pretty sure most people are not going to look back on with inordinate fondness. And I’ll toast with a fervent hope that 2023 will be a lot, lot better.

I don’t usually do much of anything on New Year’s Eve. I decided not to publish any long, involved, research-laden posts today, but to resume that come Monday.

Staying up till midnight is no problem for me, since I’m a night owl and always have been. Actually, even when young, I had somewhat of an aversion to New Year’s Eve. To the idea of a night when you were supposed to have fun or else. A reminder of the speedy passage of time. With alcohol drinking. And the obligatory midnight kiss, which wasn’t a fun moment if you didn’t like your date.

Once or twice I went to Times Square to see the ball go down in person and not just on TV. Curiously, those were some of my better New Year’s Eves. Maybe it was the people I was with those nights. We ate at Tad’s Steaks, just for laughs, but Tad’s wasn’t bad at all.

And three years ago the very last Tad’s in New York City closed down. I had no idea any of them had lasted that long.

So let’s drink to Tad’s:

The cafeteria-style chophouse is known for hawking inexpensive meat-and-potato dinners on red trays — meals that cost little more than $1 each when the first one opened in 1957. A steak lunch today can be had for as little as $9.

At its height, Tad’s had eight New York locations out of 28 nationwide. But come Jan. 5, 2020, the red neon sign in the window advertising “broiled” steaks at 761 Seventh Ave. will go dark — as will the vast grill that played host to smoky “steak shows,” where dozens of cuts could be grilled at once during the thick of lunch hour.

Happy New Year, everyone! I’m very grateful for all of you. Here’s to a wonderful 2023, full of love, joy, and good health!

And beautiful music:

[NOTE: Some of this appeared in a previous post.]

Crime and punishment

The New Neo Posted on by

In connection with the arrest of suspect Bryan Christopher Kohberger yesterday in the Idaho student murders, there was a discussion in the comments of other cases brought to mind, such as that of Leopold and Loeb.

That case, which occurred close to 100 years ago, has remained unusually famous, probably because of the cold-bloodedness of the crime as well as the intellectual brilliance of its two youthful perpetrators, in addition to the fact that they were defended by the famously eloquent Clarence Darrow. If you’re interested, here’s a good site for information, including excerpts from Darrow’s famous summation speech. I had read most of that speech when I was quite young, and it was one of the reasons I went to law school, although as it turned out I was no Darrow.

In our discussion yesterday, a comparison with Raskolnikov, the killer in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, also came up. Commenter “Chuck” wrote this:

Crime and Punishment was also the first thing I thought of. Then I thought, no, I don’t expect the perpetrator to have a spiritual rebirth.

Well, I wouldn’t bet on it either. But I thought I’d offer the following passage in evidence. It’s by Nathan Leopold. Now, you might consider it a self-serving lie, but I think it’s the truth because the latter part of Leopold’s life bore it out. He devoted himself to humanitarian endeavors both while in prison and after he was released on parole at the age of about 53. Here’s the statement:

Looking back from the vantage point of today, I cannot understand how my mind worked then. For I can recall no feeling then of remorse. Remorse did not come until later, much later. It did not begin to develop until I had been in prison for several years; it did not reach its full flood for perhaps ten years. Since then, for the past quarter century, remorse has been my constant companion. It is never out of my mind. Sometimes it overwhelms me completely, to the extent that I cannot think of anything else.

So that’s one example. His confederate, Richard Loeb, was murdered in prison at 31 by another inmate, so there’s no way to know what his trajectory would have been had he lived longer.

Suspect arrested in Idaho student murders

The New Neo Posted on by

There will be a news conference soon, but here’s what we know so far:

Bryan Christopher Kohberger, 28, was taken into custody by local police and the FBI at 1:30 a.m. in eastern Pennsylvania on a warrant charging him with four counts of murder and burglary for the deaths of Ethan Chapin, 20; Xana Kernodle, 20; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; and Madison Mogen, 21.

The PhD student, who is studying criminal justice, appeared before a judge Friday in Monroe County Court.

A PhD student studying criminal justice – that’s quite something. A sort of Raskolnikov situation?

More information can be found here as well as here.

All murders are heinous, but these seem particularly heinous, in terms of viciousness and the youth of the victims.

A new Church Committee?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been hearing that we need a new Church Committee. Let’s take a look at the old one.

The Church Committee in Congress was bipartisan. In fact, the committee was set up in the Senate in January of 1975 by a vote of 82 to 4. Back then, Congress was not only majority Democrat but very heavily majority Democrat, to the tune of 61-37 (and actually 62-38 with the caucus breakdown). But still, the vote was nearly unanimous to form the Church Committee.

A lot of what it investigated was foreign CIA interference in international assassinations. But some involved spying on US citizens through mail by the intelligence community, in particular the CIA and FBI, focusing on letters to China and Russia. One program called Operation Shamrock appears to have begun during WWII but continued afterwards, and involved intercepting telegrams to and from foreign countries (see this).

One of the remedies that resulted from the Church Committee was the FISA court system, intended to provide oversight. But we know how that turned out.

Looking back, the scope of the intelligence operations by the CIA and FBI involving spying on US citizens back then was small compared to what we’ve been dealing with in recent years. Power begets power, and technological improvements make it much easier to be compehensive.

The following was quite prescient. It’s from Senator Frank Church himself on August 17, 1975, when he appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press:

In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. (…) Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left: such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. (…)

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

We are either teetering on the edge of that abyss or we have already fallen into it.